How the UK recycles millions of dirty old disposable coffee cups

WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 26 April

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, the ESA has launched the Sentinel-1B radar satellite to help monitor the Earth through its cloud layer, Facebook is reported to be working on its own camera and video app, Paramount Pictures has offered to lift restrictions preventing Sky subscribers from watching its content when they travel and more.

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The European Space Agency has launched the second of its Sentinel Earth-monitoring radar satellites, part of its Copernicus programme (BBC). Sentinel-1B will join the identical Sentinel-1A in monitoring our planet using advanced radar that can penetrate the cloud layer to capture images of everything from iceberg formation to pollution in shipping lanes and evidence of subsidence. Following the same orbit, 180 days apart, the satellites will between them be able to fully map the Earth every six days.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is developing its own camera app, designed to encourage its users to create and share more photos and videos. Reportedly created by the company's internet "friend-sharing" team, the app, said to be in the early stages of development, is described as resembling Snapchat, with the planned addition of a video button allowing the user to instantly begin live-streaming. The app is thought to be one of several potential new features designed to encourage Facebook users to generate more original content to fuel interaction on the social network, which has recently seen reductions in the number of personal posts.

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In an attempt to avoid an anti-trust suit from the European Commission, Paramount Pictures has offered to lift the geographic region restrictions that stop Sky customers viewing its pay-TV content when travelling and keep Europeans from accessing the service from outside the UK and Ireland (Ars Technica UK). The proposed changes to the licencing contract could, if agreed, could immediately apply to existing licencing deals, meaning that the broadcaster wouldn't have to wait until the next round of contract renegotiations to lift the geographic blocks. Five other film studios – Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros – were named in the same anti-trust action, but have yet to suggest a similar compromise, although the commission says that the "investigation is continuing".

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Volkswagen's got a radical plan to fix ride-sharing and car ownership

ByKatia Moskvitch

Twitter has introduced a new abuse reporting feature that allows users to notify the company of multiple harassing messages in a single report (Engadget). The company says that the update "makes it easier for you to provide us with more information about the extent of abuse and reduces the time it takes to do so," as online harassment often takes the form of multiple abusive messages from a single source. The update will be rolling out worldwide to Twitter users on iOS, Android and the web in the coming weeks.

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Researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam analysed 298,000 human genomes to for the first time identify genes that play a key role in our levels of happiness, depression and neuroticism (Science Daily). The team found three genetic variants for happiness, two that can be linked to differences in symptoms of depression and eleven locations on the human genome that could account for varying degrees of neuroticism. Prof Meike Bartels explained that "this study is both a milestone and a new beginning: A milestone because we are now certain that there is a genetic aspect to happiness and a new beginning because the three variants that we know are involved account for only a small fraction of the differences between human beings. We expect that many variants will play a part."

The personal data of 1.1 million members of BeautifulPeople.com have been put up for sale online by hackers (WIRED). The dating site, which describes itself as "the largest internet dating community exclusively for the beautiful" says that the data is from 2015 and that the vulnerability which allowed it to be stolen has since been fixed, but this is unlikely to be of any great consolation to members whose data is currently on sale. The stolen data was discovered by security researcher security researcher Chris Vickery, who last week identified a leak of Mexico's entire voter database.

A new study by researchers at Indiana University in the USA has taken advantage of the vast amount of public data showing the development and interactions behind Wikipedia to analyse the formation of social hierarchies and behavioural norms among its editors (Gizmodo). They found that "the evolution of Wikipedia’s norm network is akin to bureaucratic systems that predate the information age," comparing it to "a university system [...], General Electric, or AT&T." Co-author Simon DeDeo described the emergence of a privileged class of "super-editors", observing that "you start with a decentralised democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks. Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else."

Ex-Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have announced that this autumn they'll be launching DriveTribe, a "digital media platform" for car enthusiasts that will include an online community and both professionally created and user-generated content (TechCrunch). The plan is that users will sign up to the "tribe" that reflects their own motoring interests and that the celebrity trio will host and create original content for their own tribes. Richard Hammond said that "gamers have got Twitch, travellers have got TripAdvisor and fashion fans have got, oh, something or other too. But people who are into cars have got nowhere. There’s no grand-scale online motoring community where people can meet and share video, comments, information and opinion. DriveTribe will change that."

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How the UK recycles millions of dirty old disposable coffee cups

ByRichard Priday

John Romero and Adrian Carmack have announced their new game, Blackroom, a first person shooter set in a world of holographic simulations gone bad, which is to be partially Kickstarter funded (Polygon). Romero said that "we're developing exactly the type of game we think a lot of shooter fans want. It's the type of shooter we're known for, and the type of game we love to play ourselves. It's a skillful shooter, from movement to weapon and map mastery." Romero and Carmack, along with Tom Hall and John Carmack, were of the original co-founders of id Software and are perhaps still best known for their role in creating the seminal Doom.

To promote its range of illuminated gaming keyboards, Logitech built a wall out of 160 of them and programmed the array to display a remarkable retro-gaming styled animated sequence including everything space shooter bullet storms to a what looks like a hat tip to Shigesato Itoi's Earthbound (VentureBeat). The keyboard wall was built at the Penny Arcade Expo and the animation was created using Logitech's Orion Spectrum LED custom keyboard lighting controller.

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Fortnite shunning the Android Play Store is a major security headache

ByKatia Moskvitch

Valve's gaming platform Steam is diverging into wider content distribution, striking a deal with movie studio Lionsgate. Although Steam has offered select films for sale through its storefront in the past, these have been mostly gaming related titles such as Indie Game: The Movie. A partnership with Lionsgate stands to bring major releases to the service, as the label controls the likes of The Hunger Games and Saw franchises. At present, all movies are only available as streaming rentals rather than downloadable purchase. Prices range from £3.49 to £4.49, and provide a 48 hour window to view the rented film within a 30 day period. On the plus side, they should be viewable on any platform that Steam operates on, including PC, Linux, Mac, SteamOS and Steam VR, via an in-headset screen.

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